58th World Health Assembly
Statement by La Leche League International,
a Nongovernmental Organization in official relations with WHO

Heidi
Kuonen-Goetz, LLL Leader, Switzerland, represented La Leche League
International at the 58th World Health Assembly (WHA) that was held
in Geneva Switzerland, May 16-25, 2005.

Mr. Chair,
Member States,

Thank
you for providing this oppurtunity for La Leche League International
(LLLI) to briefly address the 58th World Health Assembly.

In celebration
of World Health Day, April 7,2005, LLLI joined the World Health
Organization in recognizing the importance of maternal and child
health in building strong families, communities, and societies.

Breastfeeding
provides the cornerstone for life-long good health. While we live
in an age of technological advances, we need look no further than
the simple, time-tested, readily available, lowcost, and largely
untapped resource of human milk to make a major impact on child
and mother health.

The health
benefits of breastfeeding extend to the mother as well. Breastfeeding
lowers her risk of breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancer, osteoporosis,
and postpartum haemorrhaging. Most of all, breastfeeding empowers
women:
• Breastfeeding reduces a mother's economic and medical
dependence.
• Breastfeeding diminishes the power of commercial interests
to manipulate in the advertising of breastmilk substitutes.
• Breastfeeding confirms a woman's power to control her
own body.
• Breastfeeding confirms a woman's unique ability to care
for her infant in the best way possible.
• Breastfeeding challenges the view of breasts as only sex
objects.
Breastfeeding empowers women by giving them the ability to act
and the right to do so. An environment that supports breastfeeding
is one that ensures that women have the right to correct information
to make informed choices, the right to legal protection and social
support for breastfeeding in public and at work, and the right
to skilled counselling and sympathetic support.1

Breastfeeding
acts as a natural child spacer, ensuring that a woman's
body has adequate time between births to recover and prepare for
another pregnancy. A woman's ability to nourish her infant
through breastfeeding does not depend on social status, and breastfeeding
provides an equal beginning to both male and female infants.

In even
the most optimal economic setting, artificial breastmilk substitutes
significantly compromise the health and well-being of mothers
and babies. Seeing that powdered formula that meets current standards
is not a sterile product and may occasionally contain pathogens
adds to the problems mothers face when confronted with options
about infant feeding.

As obvious
as it would seem that breastfeeding could play a major role in
improving health for mother and child, sadly, less than 35% of
all infants are exclusively breastfed even for the first four
months.2 Certainly, there are challenges that exist that keep
that statistic low, including the inappropriate marketing of breastmilk
substitutes and a general lack of appreciation of the economic
value of breastfeeding. These challenges reinforce the global
call to action as laid out in the Global Strategy for Infant and
Young Child Feeding. Breastfeeding is also a key intervention
in meeting the Millennium Development Goals.3

La Leche
League International has been comitted to this effort for nearly
a half-century. With over 12,500 accredited La Leche League Leaders
and breastfeeding peer counsellors in 65 countries LLLI provides
information and support through group meetings, one-on-one counseling,
publications in 25 languages, and on-going education in the form
of international, regional, national, and local level conferences
and seminars. The LLLI Center for Breastfeeding Information is
one of the world's largest professional collections of breastfeeding-related
materials.4 The strength of LLLI's approach is based on
mother-to mother support that breastfeeding, though natural,
is a learned behavior, best learned by watching other mothers.

It is
a global responsibility to create supportive environments in order
that mothers and babies can initiate breastfeeding and continue
breastfeeding as they desire. La Leche League International stands
ready to continue working towards the goal of making every mother
and child count--through breastfeeding, one baby at a time.